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Institute for the Development of Human Arts
 

institute for the development of human arts

2020 Year in Review

2020 was the year no one saw coming. As we experienced a series of unprecedented challenges with robust impacts on mental health and community care, the links between personal and societal crisis and transformation were continuously illuminated. As more people directed their attention to mental health, IDHA helped ensure that these conversations centered the influence of systemic oppression on our well being, the voices of lived experiences, and the multiple dimensions of health.

 
 
 
 

Programs

Organization

 
 
 
 
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 Letter from our Leadership

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Dear IDHA Community,

We are excited and humbled to present IDHA’s first ever year in review. As we turn the page on another chapter, we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on all we accomplished this past year as a community. And what a year it was.

2020 brought about a series of unprecedented challenges with significant impacts on mental health and community care. The pandemic spread out of control while prompting a period of isolation, uncertainty, and grief. The summer ushered in a long overdue reckoning with racial injustice, which spurred necessary debate around replacing “cops” with “care.” It has never been more urgent to address the inherent connection between social and political realities and our individual mental health, a connection that provided the founding inspiration for IDHA.

Five years ago, Jazmine left her job in the mental health system feeling incredibly disillusioned with the ways we treat people with mental health issues. She envisioned better training that addressed the root causes of trauma and suffering, humane alternatives to institutionalization, and more models of support that acknowledge the reality of what people are going through. Around the same time, Jessie was deep into an ongoing inquiry to find meaning in her family’s struggles with the mental health system, after becoming acutely aware of the ways it can further harm those labeled as sick or diseased. We are beyond proud of what IDHA has grown into today: a hub of knowledge and wisdom for those who want to dream up other ways forward, nurture transformative thought, and improve our world. 

As we enter 2021, we remain as committed as ever to providing a home for critical dialogue and exploration. We will continue to facilitate crucial conversations that center the structural factors that have long impacted our mental health, but became impossible to ignore this year, such as poverty, unprecedented economic decline, racism, and other forms of systemic oppression. At IDHA, we see breakdown as an opportunity for breakthrough, crisis as an opportunity for transformation. Rather than reinvent the wheel or prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach, we will uplift the wisdom and knowledge that sprung up throughout the course of the pandemic, and has inherently existed in our communities forever. 

Thank you for joining us on the path to transformation,

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Jazmine Russell

Co-Founder

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Jessie Roth

Director

 

Programmatic Highlights

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Training

In 2020, IDHA pivoted entirely to virtual trainings in response to the pandemic. Core to our approach and values, all offerings were led in collaboration between individuals with professional training and those with lived experience. Through our live Spring and Fall semesters, as well as our “evergreen” courses on Teachable, we create many spaces for individuals communities to connect, learn, and share with each other.

 

School for Transformative Mental Health

Spring 2020

91

Participants trained

15

States represented

 

IDHA hosted our first ever virtual training series between February and April 2020. Over the course of three sessions, The School for Transformative Mental Health introduced participants to a set of transformative frameworks, collaborative strategies, and radical practices for understanding mental health. We discussed social justice-informed approaches to trauma-informed care, the intersections of mental health and systems of oppression, and advocacy and supervision strategies for peer specialists. We hosted faculty from Community Access, Columbia University, Howie the Harp Advocacy Center, and Mad in America.

Our Spring participants represented a wide array of professions and identities from across the country, including psychiatrists, social workers, students, volunteer doulas, in-home therapists, anti-racist consultants, storytellers, artists, peer specialists, and counselors working with at-risk youth and in homeless shelters.

 

Trainings at a glance

trauma
From Trauma-Informed to Healing-Centered:
Relational Approaches for Advancing Social Justice
Noel Hunter and Leah Harris
oppression
Our Struggles are Intertwined: Intersections of
Mental Health and Oppression
Mariel Buque and Noah Gokul
peer
Peer Specialists at Work: Advocacy
and Supervision Strategies
Lynnae Brown and Noah Phillips
 

Healing Systems

Fall 2020

215+

Participants trained

30

States represented

 

IDHA’s Fall 2020 series Healing Systems was our most thematically cohesive semester to date. Offered between October and December, this series sought to go beyond “how to”style skills training to advance a new narrative of mental health that breaks down power asymmetries, creates space for critical dialogue, and acknowledge the societal and structural factors that contribute to inequity, trauma, and mental illness. Over three sessions, we explored “systems” at every level: oppressive societal structures and institutions, communities and networks of individuals, and the systems we embody. We hosted faculty representing the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Open Excellence, Mental Health Association, generative somatics, and Black Therapists Rock. Drawing on lessons learned from the Spring, we more than doubled our reach from the prior semester.

This semester also incorporated novel strategies for remote engagement and sustained learning via Mighty Networks. Our new and growing learning community provided an opportunity to engage with other students, share and be introduced to supplemental resources, and interact with the faculty.

 

Trainings at a glance

macro
Systems Thinking: Deconstructing
the Landscape of Social Services
Milta Vega Cardona and Robin Schlenger
oppression
Participatory Approaches to Treatment and Healing: Adaptations of Open Dialogue
Ro Speight and Sandy Steingard
peer
Embodied Transformation:
Somatics and Internal Family Systems
Deran Young and Sumitra Rajkumar
 
 

 “The social and biomedical sciences offer tools to verify efficacy, but often lack the imagination or critical theory to actually do the dreaming up of any new ways forward. I am so grateful for IDHA for filling that gap and creating such powerful dialogue and transformative thought.”

- IDHA Healing Systems participant

 
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 Self-Paced Training

offered via Teachable

1,350

students enrolled this year

1,650

all time course completions

IDHA’s self-paced trainings enable us to reach many more people than we can in our live semesters. These offerings are also “evergreen,” meaning they can be accessed and completed at the participant's leisure. This year, we continued to adapt our in-person offerings for a growing national and international audience.

In May, we launched Dangerous Gifts facilitated by Sascha DuBrul. This class is designed for anyone interested in creative ways of exploring experiences that are often labeled “mental illness” outside the medical model framework.

In June, in response to a long overdue reckoning with racial injustice and in support of the movement for Black Lives, we adapted Our Struggles are Intertwined from our Spring series. The class was released for free, with 100% of all donations forwarded to Black-led organizations leading the resistance (e.g. Loveland Foundation and Black Visions Collective) during the month of June. Our timely release was affirmed by the 1,000 new students who joined us on Teachable that month. The training was accompanied by a diverse list of resources crowdsourced by our community, including information about healing practices, crisis support for those experiencing racialized trauma, and how to stay safe and connected during direct action.

Our existing modules on The History of the Mad Movement & Alternatives to Biomedical Approaches and Trauma, Growth & Resilience continue to be met with success, with new students enrolling weekly. 

 
 

“IDHA seems to be one step ahead of academic knowledge and service provision, clearly articulating the multiple dimensions that give context to someone's suffering and finding concrete ways of addressing them. This is not only timely, but urgent.”

- IDHA teachable Training participant

 
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 Community Events

 IDHA community events are a crucial counterpart to our trainings, offering less formal spaces to share stories and foster connection. This year, our events helped foster connection, support, and shared knowledge for peers, clinicians, family members, and all who are interested in shifting the way we practice mental health care.

 
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As COVID-19 spread across the country, IDHA sprang into action. We adapted all planned forthcoming events to take place online, and organized a series of rapid response events to provide immediate support to our community. A series of care calls helped our immediate and wider community navigate the period of crisis and opportunity brought on by the pandemic. Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) workshops introduced a set of tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices, unique stories, and community resources. IDHA intern Pauline Pisano initiated a monthly community open mic, driven by the core IDHA principle of “healing as a creative act.” These open mics ignited the radical imagination of our community by creating space for those who have been marginalized by the mental health system to share their stories and reflections through music and art. Our response and event offerings were featured in a Mad In America article about Survivor-Led Mutual Aid Projects Flourish in a Time of Crisis.

We added a new event proposal form to our website, with the goal of gathering a wider range of ideas for community gatherings and moving toward a programmatic vision that is increasingly member-led. The form yielded brilliant workshops such as How to Convert Your Life into Legend: Inside the Hero’s Journey facilitated by Audrey Dimola in November.

 
 

“The creativity was so cathartic. IDHA is a supportive community with a different take on mental health where one doesn’t feel boxed into a diagnosis.”

- IDHA OPEN MIC PARTICIPANT

 
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 Advocacy and Movement Building

This year, IDHA clarified our advocacy and movement building strategy in response to the silos in our broader social justice landscape and the transformative mental health movement. We organized two panel events that elevated the voices of those with lived experience and brought together a range of frontline organizers with a wealth of wisdom and range of perspectives.

 

Bedlam

May 2020

85+

signatories of our open letter

160

registered for the panel

 
 

In May, we organized around the new PBS documentary Bedlam, which examines the United States’ mental health crisis. We hosted a virtual community discussion with the goal of reclaiming the history of psychiatric survivors, fostering critical dialogue, and proposing a vision for the future informed by lived experience, grounded in rights and social justice. We were joined by Azza Altiraifi, Akeem Browder, Felix Guzman, and Leah Harris in a virtual panel conversation moderated by Sascha DuBrul. Our panel conversation was lauded as essential viewing, amplifying a perspective on the film that could not be found anywhere else.

The event was accompanied by an open letter to PBS, which sought to inspire dialogue and proliferate an understanding of mental health that acknowledges and addresses the numerous contexts in which our well being exists. The letter was signed by 85+ mental health, disability, and social justice organizations and individuals. This work was featured in a Mad In America article called Public Media, Power, and the Fight for Narrative Justice.

 

Decarcerating Care

September 2020

4,000+

people registered

2,500+

JOINED LIVE

The planning for our Decarcerating Care panel event came on the heels of a summer marked by ongoing police violence, much of it perpetrated against disabled people of color. As the movement for racial justice gained momentum, a lot of conversation focused on how to divest funding from the police and reallocate it to mental health care, omitting the crucial perspective of psychiatric survivors who have been harmed by the system.

On September 14th, we were joined by Asantewaa Boykin of Mental Health First Sacramento, Tim Black of CAHOOTS in Eugene, psychiatric survivor Stella Akua Mensah, sociologist Neil Gong, and Project LETS Executive Director Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu in a conversation facilitated by Noah Gokul. Our campaign was featured in a podcast by the Sanctuary for Independent Media in upstate New York and an article by KQED in California. The event was accompanied by a form that gathered diverse community perspectives on the topic of police involvement in mental health crisis, with the goal of initiating dialogue that leads to collaborative action.

This year, IDHA launched a brand new Movement Calendar, which seeks to strengthen and unify the transformative mental health movement by cross-listing events by our peers and partners in one place. This calendar directly supports our goals to forge partnerships across movements and disciplines to fuel intersectional, cross-movement, and transformative change.

 
 

 Organizational Highlights

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 Structure

IDHA has been intentionally developing our organizational structure since 2019, defining the scope and decision-making processes of our constituency groups. We deliberately developed a hybrid structure that aligns with and enables us to live our principles and values. Our approach to governance is committed to bringing in and continually nurturing new leadership within IDHA at all levels of the organization.

 
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Board Development

At the end of 2019, IDHA elected our inaugural Board of Directors through a collaborative and inclusive process. Our Board is composed of highly-trusted members of the IDHA community, and includes people from diverse backgrounds with a range of skills and identities in and out of the mental health system (e.g. activists, trauma survivors, family members, artists, researchers). In 2020, our Board helped us navigate unforeseen challenges and harness them as opportunities to enhance internal policies and procedures, as well as inform organic next steps to strengthen our culture. At the end of the year, we launched a Board expansion process. We look forward to adding new members in early 2021 to complement our current expertise with areas that are less represented and crucial to IDHA’s current operations and growth, such as non-profit governance, strategy and planning, fundraising, transformative justice, and anti-oppressive organizing.

 
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Membership Launch

Membership is a core element of IDHA’s structure that enables us to grow our base and spread the paradigm of transformative mental health around the country and world. It also enables us to strategically develop leadership within our community. In 2020, we defined what it means to be a member of IDHA, how to become a member, and the perks that members receive. We developed several work streams to make it easier for members to share or signal boost their ideas, such as the community event proposal and movement calendar. We kicked things off with a Membership Launch Party on December 7th, and added more than 30 new members in the first month of the program’s official existence.

 
 

“IDHA gives people a space and social network to not feel so alone in seeing mental health differently than dominant cultural narratives. Those who want to fight together, learn in community, share insights, and heal with others. It really does cater to so many people coming from different backgrounds, all there for different reasons.”

- IDHA member

 
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 Strategy

IDHA’s strategy articulates our long-term priorities and areas of growth, while holding that our vision and project goals cannot be separated from who we are and how we come together as a community.

 
Draft graphic rendering of IDHA’s theory of change

Draft graphic rendering of IDHA’s theory of change

Strategic Visioning

IDHA launched its first formal strategic visioning process in April, guided by a desire to unify our collective vision, evaluate our projects, and move into a future built upon shared principles and values. Co-Founder Jazmine Russell designed this process to be collaborative, adaptive, and ongoing. Over the course of seven months, the collaborative process provided regular opportunities for IDHA organizers to give input and offer their vision to the process through bi-monthly meetings and quarterly questionnaires. Jazmine facilitated a series of community strategic visioning sessions to gather feedback on the following topics: strategic visioning process and purpose, defining transformative mental health, landscape analysis, and theory of change. In early 2021, we will release a final multi-year plan that defines mission and vision; essential intent; landscape and context; theory of change and program model; priority program areas; impact goals and desired outcomes; and  cross-cutting principles and values.

 
2021 Anti Oppression commitments

2021 Anti Oppression commitments

Anti Oppression

Central to IDHA’s strategy and organizational development is an ongoing process of becoming an anti-racist organization. In 2019, consultant Angelica Otero facilitated a workshop that led to us defining the steps IDHA needs to take, is taking, and will continue to take, to become a more anti-racist organization. This summer, anti-racist consultant Milta Vega Cardona facilitated a three-part training for our community to further deepen our analysis and organizational roadmap. We developed a common language around power and racism, built intimacy, and shared personal and organizational reflections on the ways white supremacy shows up in ourselves and our work. These workshops were crucial to our strategic visioning process, identifying the necessary steps to combat white supremacy culture in and outside of IDHA. Following the training with Milta, we updated our anti-oppression strategy.

IDHA also made strides towards making our events more accessible in 2020 (e.g. offering ASL interpretation and live closed captioning, using visual descriptions during the Bedlam and Decarcerating Care events). We still have much more room to grow in terms of integrating this level of accessibility across all of our programs and operations, and look forward to strengthening this in 2021. When we moved all of our work online in March, we acknowledged the inherent barriers to online learning, and were mindful of always offering a call-in option to our trainings and events.

 
 

“As a very new clinical mental health worker who sees so much wrong with the system already, it is incredibly validating to be surrounded by so many compassionate, forward-thinking individuals who are trying to improve this system and our world.”

- IDHA TRAINEE

 
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External Relations

 

Communications

This year, IDHA greatly improved communications with our audiences. We more than tripled our Mailchimp newsletter audience following our Decarcerating Care panel event, and are now able to reach many more individuals with a vested interest in transformative mental health with announcements on upcoming trainings, events, and scholarship opportunities. Our social platforms are also an important way that we amplify the work of our partners.

Our team experimented around creative usages of social media and grew our audiences across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We achieved a cohesive brand across our platforms, unifying our color scheme and fonts. We began to integrate more video, pulling clips from recorded classes and events to highlight our content, faculty, and community.

 

Fundraising

Our small (but growing!) organization met the fundraising challenges of 2020 with conviction, and gratefully managed to resource our ambitious work plan. Training revenue, individual donations, and membership dues accounted for more than a third of our revenue, diversifying our funding sources and providing crucial sustainability to our operations. We were also beyond thrilled to secure our first ever six-figure grant to support our efforts to develop IDHA’s core transformative mental health curriculum.

As we grow, we seek to maintain primarily grassroots funding sources. If you donated any amount to IDHA in 2020, thank you so much for your generous contribution. Support from folks like you plays a pivotal role in sustaining our work, and helps ensure the longevity of our radical vision for change.

 

 Thank You

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 This year of impact would not have been possible without the following folks:

 
 

Board of Directors

Xinlin Chen
Noah Phillips
Denise Ranaghan
Jason Stevens

IDHA Social work interns

Pauline Pisano (2019-2020)
Eliza Freed (2020-2021)

Training Committee

Leah Pressman
Cindy Peterson-Dana
Sascha DuBrul
Brendan Heidenreich
Noah Phillips
Jason Stevens

2020 Faculty

Lynnae Brown
Mariel Buque
Noah Gokul
Leah Harris
Noel Hunter
Noah Phillips
Sumitra Rajkumar
Robin Schlenger
Ronda Speight
Sandra Steingard
Milta Vega Cardona
Deran Young